How To Stage Your Home For a Quick Sale

Home staging is a method of preparing your home prior to a sale in order to bring about a quicker sale at a higher price. Home staging is an art as well as a science that has been refined and defined over the years by real estate professionals. There are many different tactics involved in home staging depending not only on the homeowner but also on the area of the country where the home is located as well as local real estate demographics and other factors.

Colors, textures, even odors, contribute to the overall impression your home will make on prospective buyers. Home staging done by professional stagers will bring forth your home’s strengths while understating its weaknesses. You will, no doubt, be asked to vacate your premises, clean it up, and get rid of clutter but it doesn’t stop there. Tactics designed to sell your home at a higher price with a quicker turn around include the following:

Staging tactics

Furniture displays

Put your best foot forward for your prospective buyer by staging your home properly

1. You will want to remove all excess furniture from each area of your home. Concentrate instead on core pieces of furniture and design each room’s contents around them.
2. Pull all furniture away from walls to give a more open appearance and facilitate traffic flow patterns from one room or area to another.
3. Periodically move furnishings around in new and different designs and patterns.

Craft an ambience of welcoming warmth and creativity

1. Create a warming entrance to your home to welcome prospective home buyers. Eliminate worn, rotting, or damaged planters. Remove all the clutter like bikes, shoes, and worn out welcome mats.
2. Utilize rooms in a different, less conventional manner. Transform that junk room into a craft or rumpus room.
3. Examine the lighting in each room. Ideally, accent lighting should be layered with task and ambient lighting to eliminate shadows and dark areas. A good benchmark is to aim for approximately 100 watts of lighting for each 50 square feet of area.

Combine creativity with a common sense color palette

1. Avoid the use of strong colors on your walls and ceilings. Oversize furniture is another bug-a-boo when staging your home for a quick sale. Think in terms of light, but not fragile, pieces.
2. Do not hesitate to use color creatively. Be careful of garish colors, however. Color schemes like an all-white paint job in every room make your property look stark, glaring, and cold.
3. If you have the time, think about freshening different pieces of furniture with a fresh coat of paint. Gloss black works well for many pieces.
4. Avoid displaying art, especially paintings, in traditional fashion. Instead of placing paintings on the walls at the same height, think about different patterns and places that you might be able to display your paintings in new and surprising ways.

Displaying accessories

1. It is a common staging principle that accessories should always be displayed in odd-numbered layouts. Three is an acceptable and welcome number for visual presentations of vases, knickknacks, and bric-a-brac.
2. A good policy is to avoid anything that might serve as a distraction to the home buyer.

Flower presentations

1. Don’t neglect to place flower arrangements in strategic places. Change the displays regularly and keep them watered properly. Avoid flower displays that are particularly fragrant inside the home.
2. Titillate your prospect’s senses by adding a touch of pleasing greenery to your home to lend an element of freshness and a sense of the outdoors.